The Biggest Legal Battles Shaping the Fashion Industry Today


Fashion has always reveled in its knock-down, drag-out legal brawls. 

Whether it’s a courtroom square off or a nasty back and forth in the press, the drama speaks to the competitive nature of the business, the branded turf companies are looking to protect and the big-time dollars and market share at stake.  

Most fashion lawsuits today revolve around intellectual property rights — the intangible fuel that keeps fashion moving forward. 

But that might be starting to change. 

New types of law are being made in fashion. 

The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, challenged Tapestry Inc.’s $8.5 billion deal to buy Capri Holdings with a suit that upset the status quo in dealmaking. 

And there’s more to come. 

“Fashion law is getting bigger,” said attorney attorney Douglas Hand of Hand Baldachin & Associates, who wrote a more than 1,000-page book on the topic entitled, “The Business and Law of Fashion and Retail.”

“The number of cases will now grow because there is actual black letter law, or there will be black letter law with respect to regulation of the fashion industry,” he said. 

Sooner or later and in some form, Hand predicted the federal Fabric Act, California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act and New York’s Fashion Act would become law.

And that signals a legal future with more cases that revolve around the environmental, social and governance practices of fashion companies — tackling topics from greenwashing to how closely brands are monitoring the factories making the looks they sell. 

“For the first time, really in a long time, we’re going to have fashion law that is on the books — specific fashion law, not intellectual property laws that applies to fashion, not corporate laws,” Hand said. 

And that will move the industry’s relation to the law into a new phase. 

“The regulators write the law, but then the courts essentially interpret the law and the case law evolves from there,” he said. “And so the law evolves based on not just the regulations, but the case law, which interprets the regulation. We’re absolutely at the chrysalis stage of that.”

As fashion enters that new stage — and gets ready for a new round of legal fisticuffs — here’s a look back at some of the key fashion lawsuits in the U.S.



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